Eugene Jarecki of Waitsfield, director of “The House I Live In,” which won the Grand Jury Prize for nonfiction work in 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. / Sundance photo

Written by

SUSAN GREEN, for the Free Press

The 2010 case of a young black man named Anthony Johnson, arrested in St. Albans for being in the company of people with crack cocaine, caught Eugene Jarecki’s attention. “The guy had no drugs on him at all,” explained the Waitsfield filmmaker. “He was guilty by association. But the courts have the power to throw the book at you because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws.”

Vermont was among 25 states Jarecki included in “The House I Live In,” which won the Grand Jury Prize for nonfiction work last week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. It tackles what he calls this country’s “almost vindictive system of mass incarceration,” a consequence of “the war against narcotics that disproportionately targets African-Americans.”

The 118-minute documentary takes its title from a 1943 song first popularized by Frank Sinatra and later by Paul Robeson, whose version is heard over the closing credits: “All races, all religions/ that’s America to me...”

America to Jarecki has a long way to go before it achieves equal justice under the law.

“Our war on drugs is a national scourge that’s led to us having the largest number of prisoners in the world,” he said. “We’ve got 2.3 million people in jail, more than one-quarter of them for non-violent drug crimes.

About half are black, even though they’re only 13 percent of the population as a whole. More of them are incarcerated today than there were living in slavery before the Civil War.”

These staggering statistics and the human toll of it all share screen time with Jarecki’s personal narrative. As a child, his father fled Germany in the 1930s, when the Third Reich began persecuting Jews. This history resonates in the film when producer David Simon, who created HBO’s “The Wire,” is interviewed. He talks on camera about drugs and U.S. policies to combat them as “a holocaust in slow motion.”

Another angle for Jarecki is the saga of Nannie Jeter — that’s her actual first name, not a job description — who was his family’s housekeeper for several decades. While she was taking care of well-to-do white people in New York’s Westchester County, her youngest son became an addict back in New Haven, Conn.

(Page 2 of 3)

The so-called “war on drugs,” promulgated by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, launched what is now a 40-year effort seemingly as unsuccessful as it is expensive. The cost to date: $1 trillion and 45 million arrests. Yet “drugs are more available than ever,” Jarecki pointed out.

“The public is always worked into a frenzy by politicians who want to get tough on crime,” he suggested. “So we enact draconian laws with mandatory sentences. We see ever­escalating rhetoric. A federal judge in Iowa told me that he has no choice about how much prison time to impose, even if the convicted person won a Medal of Honor the day before.

How can that possibly make any sense?”

Rape, robbery and murder frequently result in less harsh penalties than those applied to drug crimes, Jarecki said. “But the public doesn’t seem to be aware this is happening.”

The inequity may be most apparent when it comes to the stiffer sentences required for those caught with crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. “The punishment is 100 times more severe,” Jarecki noted. “The U.S.

Supreme Court ruled that was unfair (in 2007), but now the ratio is 18 to one for crack. Crack is thought to be more prevalent in the African-American community; actually, only 13 percent of users are black.”

In his view, poverty produces despair that can lead to drug dependence in the black community “when people are locked out of the mainstream economy. They also are more routinely profiled by law enforcement and often have more difficulty finding a lawyer.” Jarecki talked with cops, prosecutors, defense attorneys, wardens, inmates and their families. He went out with police manning roadblocks to arbitrarily stop cars and question the occupants. “I asked one officer, who was an extremely nice guy, why. He said, ‘We’re on a fishing expedition.’ I told him, ‘My father came from Germany.

When they began stopping citizens, it was really a bad sign.’” The Nazis “fear-mongered the public into thinking Jews were the enemy,” Jarecki said, adding the the same process has been unfolding here for African-Americans and Hispanics.

(Page 3 of 3)

Good people can be caught up in a bad policy, he said, thanks to which “America is more addicted to this system of punishment than addicts are to drugs.”

In recent years, the ethnic equation has been altered a bit as more and more Americans are left without employment opportunities when factories and mills close. At prisons in the Midwest, Jarecki spoke with working-class white men busted for methamphetamine “who said they were facing the kinds of sentences they thought only back people get.”

The issue, he thinks, is now as much about class as it is about race.

“The House I Live In,” which Jarecki plans to take on a grassroots tour before its theatrical release, has gotten enthusiastic reviews from critics who saw it at Sundance. (His “Why We Fight,” about the military-industrial complex, earned the top documentary prize at the 2005 festival.) In the Occupy Wall Street era, films that examine the plight of the so-called 99 percent might draw a wide audience, he indicated.

“The headless horseman of capitalism,” as Jarecki calls it, is “the unholy alliance between our politicians and the prison­industrial complex. It has an insatiable appetite, which means there’s a need for a bigger and bigger market. This drains us of our economic and human resources. This is a form of self­cannibalization.”

And, in too many instances, a form of racism.

So black youngsters like Anthony Johnson — busted in St. Albans, tried in a Burlington court and now serving six years in a federal penitentiary — haven’t got a good chance of escaping the paradigm, no matter where in the country they find themselves.

“The paradox is that Vermont’s such a quaint, rural, lily-white, liberal state,” Jarecki contended. “It would shock most Vermonters to discover that we’re the furthest thing from progressive in our drug policies.